


Turn, Turn, Turn

by lasergirl



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Farm/Ranch, Meet-Cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-19 10:36:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22643566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasergirl/pseuds/lasergirl
Summary: Jack Thompson didn’t really intend to end up looking after 300 or so-odd acres in rural, upstate, New York. He’d spent enough time out of doors on Okinawa, swore he was going to get himself a nice cushy office job when he got back Stateside. Life, it seemed, had other plans for him.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 14





	Turn, Turn, Turn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



> For Sholio aka Laylainalaska, who pondered on Tumblr about Farm AUs and then caused this to spring into my head fully formed. Caveat: Although I have worked on a small farm, have friends and family who own farms, some of the technical stuff is straight from Google. I, like Jack, have no idea what Fescue is.

“What do you mean, ‘fixer-upper?’” Jack could barely hear his father over the pay telephone line. It crackled with static and the rooming-house halls were never quiet. He leaned against the wall, cupping one shaking hand over the mouthpiece, the other over his ear as he shouldered the handset.

“Nice, quiet property upstate. Widow didn’t want to hang onto it after her husband didn’t come back from overseas. Got it for a song. Figured you’d need someplace where you can get back on your feet. Maybe make a little money.” That was definitely a jab at Jack’s independence.

“I’ve got money.” Which was a lie. Jack had rented a bed in a rooming-house with his demob money, but the rest had quickly been used to buy alcohol. The booze had helped numb his shattered nerves but hadn’t done much for his employability or temper. “I’m fine.”

But his father plowed on: “She said it’s been rented out for hayfields the last few seasons but a chunk of it turned over to food production in ‘41. You can decide what you want to do with it come springtime. But you’d better get a move on, son, there’s some chickens and goats and they’re fed til the end of the week but after that it’s up to you.”

So in mid-February 1947, Jack Thompson found himself chopping wood for the first time in his life and wondering how the hell he was supposed to survive living in the middle of nowhere.

**

There was only one goat, as it turned out. He was big and fat and wouldn’t leave Jack alone. He followed Jack everywhere he went; on his chores to feed and water the chickens, when he drove out to the end of the farm road on the tractor to check the mail. And today he’d climbed into the back of the station wagon while he was getting ready to drive into town for groceries, so Jack just let him stay.

“Give me a break, Jarvis.” He didn’t know if the goat had an actual real name but Jarvis seemed to fit him just fine. He had black splotches on his back and a white beard on his chin. “Fine, stay there but I’m not going to avoid those potholes just for you.”

There was a new girl working the counter at Stark’s Grocery when he went to pick up his grocery order. She had dark hair and a pretty smile. And an English accent, he discovered as soon as she retrieved his order for him.

“Mister Thompson, it’s good to meet you. I believe this is complete.” She motioned to the wooden crate packed with his regular canned and dry goods. “Will there be anything else?”

“Uh, I’ll take another bottle of bourbon.” He’d tried to stop drinking so much but he hadn’t been sleeping well. He didn’t like the look on the local people’s faces when he bought yet another bottle of cheap booze, but this girl was new. He could get away with it.

“Certainly.” She slipped the extra bottle into a brown paper bag. “Here, let me help you carry it out.”

She hefted the crate onto a wheeled dolly and maneuvered it around the counter. Jack just stood there, holding his bottle of bourbon, feeling useless. “Uh, it’s the brown station wagon. With the goat.”

“A goat?”

“Uh, yeah, he’s kinda bossy. Eats everything.” Jack came around the back of the vehicle. The girl was standing with her hands on her hips, surveying the situation.

“Oh, I see. Now tell me, Mister Thompson, did you intend to have your goat give birth in the back of your car?”

Well, shit.

**

Peggy Carter basically moved into Jack’s barn to care for Jarvis, the now determined to be female nanny goat, and her twins, Ana and Edwin. Spring was coming, but it was still a few weeks away from being warm enough to turn them outside.

“They’ll freeze if they don’t have a decent layer of straw,” she explained while hefting a square bale across the barn with ease. Jack admired her confidence. “We’ll lay this down and you have a brood heater which should warm this pen enough, mounted there in the corner.”

“Is that what that thing is?” Jack scratched his chin, feeling a few days’ worth of beard growth. Peggy had showed up at the crack of dawn with a bucketful of goat-nursery supplies and had commandeered the old pigpen for Ana and Edwin.

“Why do I get the distinct impression that you are in over your head, Mister Thompson?” Peggy paused in her straw-strewing and peered intently into his eyes. He almost shrank away from her, but then she shook her head. “As I expected. You shall need some help getting ready for the planting, then. Fortunately I’m available.”

“How come you know so much?” Jack figured he’d may as well look busy so he helped Peggy spread the straw knee-deep in the pigpen.

“Land Army,” she said proudly. “Couldn’t join up, didn’t want to go into nursing, so I spent the war working the fields to feed everyone. Marvellous work. I worked the switchboards at a telephone company before this and it was awful.”

“I thought you worked at Stark’s Grocery. Won’t he miss you?”

She scoffed. “Clearly, you need my help much more than he does. Do you have a spare bedroom?”

“Wait, are you… are you staying here?”

“Tsk, tsk, you’re going to need someone to show you how to run the farm until you can sell a harvest,” and she kept at it, setting up the goat nursery while listing planting dates and rainfall averages for the previous years until he just gave up.

**

It was raining, and the long gravel drive up to the farm was rutted and muddy. Daniel swore as he ground the gears attempting to creep through one of the larger potholes. He was still getting the hang of the transmission. Well, that, and… everything else.

He’d been dumped with this account because it was a small plot and a good three hours’ drive away from head office. No one else wanted to drive out there just to see if the farmer’s widow was going to rent or plant her land this season, so of course it got pushed onto Daniel. It wasn’t really that terrible a drive, or wouldn’t have been in fair weather. But his half-ton truck, third-hand and built in 1933, had a cracked windshield that fogged in the rain and an ignition that acted up most days.

Daniel needed a sale this week, both to make rent and to prove to Dooley that he could pull his weight in the Strategic Seed Reserve. The rest of the guys in the office could coast on their yearly renewals and farm expansions, but he’d been fighting for every single sale since the day he was hired.

He couldn’t resent the SSR at all. He wasn’t married, didn’t have a new family or a shiny future the way some of the other salesmen did. He was luckier than a lot of the men who were injured overseas - he was alive, and he was mobile, so really he wasn’t complaining.

But it was days like today - and he swore again as the truck bottomed out in another pothole, and the engine sputtered and died - that he wished he worked someplace else.

**

“Jack, there seems to be a truck marooned in your drive,” Peggy said as she looked up from the new electric incubator on the dining room table. Her chicks were a few days away from hatching and she was on the lookout for any early pips. She’d been candling the eggs over a flashlight when the vehicle caught her eye. The old Dodge had crept slowly between puddles, but it had now ceased all forward momentum and appeared to be stalled. “Were you expecting a visitor?”

Jack glanced out the rain-streaked window. “Shit, it’s the seed vendor, I forgot he was coming out today!” He rushed to the coat rack by the door and tossed on a yellow slicker and his farm galoshes. “Be nice. I heard he’s new.”

“Hm,” Peggy said as she watched Jack wade down the drive in the pouring rain. So he’d decided to plant the fields this season after all. That was a step in the right direction. Renting the fields out to the neighbouring Masters for another season would likely result in them trying to make Jack an offer for the farm, and she didn’t want to lose all her hard work. Vernon Masters was trying for a government milk contract and wanted the land to build a new milking palace. He’d flatten the barn, the rabbit run and the chicken coop and that would be it. She had no intention of finding another farm as promising - and as in need of her skills - as this one.

The two men conversed through the window of the truck, and then Peggy watched Jack push ineffectually at the bumper after taking a look under the hood. Eventually, efforts at moving the truck were discarded and Jack motioned at the house. The driver hopped out carrying a battered briefcase and pulled a metal crutch from behind the driver’s seat. Jack spread his slicker out to cover the driver and they struggled up the drive together.

“Hey, Peg, can you get a couple of towels?” Jack burst into the front hall in a mess of water and sticky mud, “Maybe some coffee?”

She huffed, “Jack Thompson, I am not your housekeeper!” As if she didn’t remind him of this 8 or 10 times a day. Honestly. She pulled a chair around the corner from the dining room and offered it to the harried, mud-spattered driver. He sat, gratefully. “Hello, I’m Peggy Carter. I’m Mr. Thompson’s animal husbandry manager.”

The dark-haired man wiped his face with his handkerchief and smiled at her, then offered a hand to shake. She took it. “Well hi. I’m Daniel Sousa. From the Seed Reserve. Sorry about the mud.” His wet hair was curling across his forehead and he was quite unreasonably good-looking. Not that Peggy was looking.

“That’s quite alright Mr. Sousa, there’s a lot of it about.”

“Oh, call me Daniel,” he said, suddenly flustered.

Jack stomped back with an armful of towels, interrupting whatever that moment had been. “Here Mr. Sousa, dry yourself off and then we’ll talk in the kitchen.” And then he made a point of looking at Peggy as he said; “I guess I’ll go make some coffee.”

There was an awkward silence as Daniel towelled himself off. He kicked off his left shoe and paused. “Uh. I don’t usually take this one off. It’s, uh…” To demonstrate, he knocked his knuckles against his calf and there was a dull thunk. “Wood. The laces are knotted.”

“Oh!” Peggy said, “Don’t worry, we can wipe that shoe off and give you a slipper for your other foot.” She handed him an old one of Jack’s, one that Jarvis hadn’t nibbled on. “Just through there.”

Daniel limped through into the kitchen where Jack had started the percolator. He sat at the kitchen table and Jack joined him. Daniel opened his case and spread out his catalogues and account notes. Not wanting to intrude, Peggy went through to the dining room and finished her incubator inspections but as the rooms adjoined through an open doorway she wouldn’t miss a thing.

“So, Mr. Thompson, you said you’re planning to harvest hay this season on half your acreage, and you said maybe sweet corn?” Daniel asked pleasantly. “When was the last time you had corn on the North fields? What’s your nitrogen load? I’ve been recommending a rye, soybean and vetch rotation if you’re going to grow sweet corn, but if you prefer a different cover crop we could look at a three-year cycle of corn, soy and wheat or red clover. I saw that you have goats so you likely want to stay away from fescue.”

“Uh.” Peggy peered through and saw that Daniel didn’t miss the look of blind panic on Jack’s face. “I’m…. uh… What do you think is... good? Fuck! Fuck it, goddamn…. Excuse me.” Jack’s chair scraped back as he fled the kitchen abruptly, slamming the passageway door to the back porch.

The percolator bubbled and clattered on the stove, so Peggy went in and turned off the gas.

“Is he okay?” Daniel asked her.

“Mister Thompson gets... easily overwhelmed sometimes,” she told him tactfully. That was better than saying ‘he has a panic attack every time he has to make a decision.’ “He’ll come back when he’s ready.”

Daniel eyed the door warily. “I’d offer to come back later but I’m not even sure I can leave today. How well do you know his operations?”

“I’ve only been here for six weeks or so,” she told him. “This is his first growing season and truthfully, he’s in over his head. There’s a stone fruit orchard and some apple trees down the ridge, there’s a pig pen, and you’ve seen the goats. There’s proven layers, I’m hatching some broilers and I know Jack will be able to sell the hay and the corn if we can get it in the ground. ” Suddenly emboldened, she blurted out, “Steve, my fiancé, died overseas. We always talked about having our own farm. I was only looking after the kids - the goats - but then I realized that maybe a fresh start was what I needed.”

“Fresh start… yeah, I know what you mean.” Daniel sighed. “So he really doesn’t know about any of this? He sure talked a good game on the phone. I’m going to have to take some soil samples and run a couple tests to see what you can support this season. After that, we can talk about rotations and long-range plans.”

**

Out on the porch, Jack wheezed through the iron-like grip at his chest and throat. Fuck, he’d been doing so well. Made the phone call to the Seed Reserve. Stayed sober this morning so he wouldn’t smell like a bum when the vendor paid a visit. Now he had a truck stuck in his driveway and a crippled guy in his kitchen and all these fucking questions. He didn’t even know what goddamn fescue _was_ anyway!

“Fuck!”

He kicked one of the galvanized feed pails on the porch and it clattered down the stairs into the rain. He couldn’t do this, he was just lying to himself. Sure, it was a great idea, go hide his cowardly face away on some half-abandoned piece of property in Bumfuck, North Nowhere and play farmer so his father would leave him alone. Lie, and say the harvest was going great. Maybe go hunt a couple deer in October and have an accident.

That had basically been his train of thought until that Carter woman had showed up. She’d done the worst thing he’d ever had to do - think about the future. He found himself agreeing to prune the cherry trees back so that next year they’d fruit better. He let her hatch chickens in the dining room and milk the nanny goat every morning. He’d let her move into the attic bedroom even though he knew she could hear him talk in his sleep. She didn’t care _for_ him, but she’d made it clear she cared _about_ him, the way she cared about every creature on his farm.

So Jack had decided that he’d try, just try to be something resembling a human who could plant stuff in the ground and maybe break even. Just because he liked the way Peggy looked when he told her that Masters would buy their hay for a profit this year if they could bale it.

Jack paced on the porch in the rain until his breath came back to him and the shaking in his limbs had subsided. He could do this. He’d trapped the poor seed vendor in his damn driveway, the least he could do for the guy was give him a hand getting home again. He ducked back inside.

Well, and wasn’t this cosy. Carter had rounded up the property documents and they were bent over a survey map, Sousa was pointing at something with one finger and referencing his catalogs, and Peg, Peg looked like she was having the time of her life. Jack had never seen her smile that way before, not even the first day they’d turned the baby goats outside to gambol in the front yard.

“Jack!” Uh oh, now that smile was turned on him. Jack felt his knees go weak.

“Peggy?”

“Daniel’s agreed to help us out for the season!”

“Uh. What?”

“Oh, sorry Mr. Thompson, but Peggy explained that you’re both pretty new at this, and I grew up working my Papa’s farm before Agricultural College. I mean, I can help plan your crops and run the tests to make sure you’re getting the right balance of fertilizers for your soil.” Oh no, Daniel Sousa’s face had the same, wide smile. Jack was cracking. This was it. This was the end.

“I’m going to take some leave from the Seed Reserve to work with Peggy.” Daniel glanced at Peggy, who nodded in excitement. “I mean, she’ll need a second hand with the slaughter after the broilers are finished. She’s going to pay me from her market money, I’ll charge you a minor consultation fee for the soil work, and then your hay money will cover the seed bill.”

It was dizzying, but exciting, and Jack didn’t really even feel all that bad when he shook Daniel’s hand again, wondering just what the hell he was getting himself into....

END.


End file.
